The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is steamrolling across the great indexing plains. Tuesday brought news the eDonkey2000 indexing server Razorback2 was taken offline by Belgian Police, in conjunction with the MPAA. Today, the MPAA has announced a tremendous escalation in their fight against online piracy - this time targeting BitTorrent, eDonkey2000 and Newsgroup NZB indexing sites.

Specifically, seven lawsuits were filed in Federal Court across the United States. Most remarkable of these lawsuits was the MPAA's strategy to target Newsgroup NZB indexing sites. Newsgroup indexing sites function much differently than eDonkey2000 or BitTorrent sites, as their role is to supply "NZB" or Newzbin files. These NZB files greatly simplify the task of downloading material from the Newsgroups. It eliminates the once lengthy process of digging through multiple groups and headers to find the desired archive.

Because of the Newsgroups' long standing reputation of being a legitimate online source of information and community interaction, such associated indexing sites were considered immune from prosecution. Today's action dismisses this notion.

In all, nine indexing sites have been targeted (Isohunt.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com all owned by one individual.) BitTorrent: ISOHunt, TorrentSpy, NiteShadow.com, BTHub.com and TorrentBox.com; eDonkey2000: Ed2k-It.com; Newsgroups: NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net.